Reflections

I spent the past few days taking on the most difficult task yet! The saucer of this teacup has many ripples, evenly spaced, which slope down to the center where the cup sits. Along its edge, the saucer also bends in and out in accordance with the height of the ripples. The material is very shiny and very smooth, therefore, it changes whenever the light does. Even more fun is the fact that the cup sitting over the shiny saucer gets oddly reflected into the surface and bent around every ripple. Put all of this into an elliptical perspective and onto a 3' x 4ft' panel and you have before you one daunting task, with only one way to approach it....DIVE IN!

Grabbing 10 paint brushes and a huge grisaille pallet I went to work making everything happen with the paint and no under-drawing. I was really afraid of having uneven values which makes the painting the look doughy and ugly. Using big brushes and keeping my eye on the pallet helped to keep things going smoothly. A simple --but crucial-- rule for reflections is that no matter how confusing they may look, they are simply an image being projected onto an underlying surface. This was particularly tough here because the underlying surface was so forshortened. Getting through it required slowing down, and following the course of every ripple. During this project I began to see just how chaotic these relatively mechanical images become.